How I Built a Custom Camper Van (2015)

Now it's not running again.

I can imagine Europe wide fitness chains not being so common. http://www.basic-fit.com and friends seem to be building something like it. But then again, public swimming pools, and even public showers are more common and often highly subsidised.

van life is basically not viable right now. people dont like taking their shits in mcdonalds. vans get super cold and moisture can be a huge problem. showers have to be in gyms unless you want to carry tons of water with you. most areas are very hostile to van dwellers from what i can tell. but there are interesting solutions to these problems.

- van dwellers are not received well in most places. you have to park on the side of the street somewhere a lot of the time. so the obvious solution is to create some kind of business that does lot rentals. you can pay a very low fee and have a nice place to park for the night. this could be really great -- images of all kinds of different people meeting and connecting come to mind. but there is the problem that these businesses would be overrun by poor people for lack of a better word. they would become ghettos and attract a lot of crime. so perhaps a better solution is to create an app where anyone can rent out their driveway and vet each van dweller on their own based on their social media, past reviews and other information provided on the app. also vans are physically dispersed and criminals dont have a one stop shop for vulnerable vans.

- taking shits in gas stations, taking showers in gyms and moisture and cold can all be solved by the same thing: making vans from the ground up that are meant for living. i think in the end, if you want a van that is nice to live in then you need to put down real money just like any other dwelling. the van meant for living would look like this: has EV drive train and a huge battery. in the near future this will be complemented by a sophisticated generator (with huge fuel reserve) that can operate at low wattage when demand is low or operate at high wattage when demand is high such as when driving with a low battery. in the far future batteries alone will be enough. solar should be included but only to prevent the battery from losing charge completely when sitting around for a long time. showering is done with recycled water. water is stored in the floor pan and passed through a filter between showers. ozone is easily generated and mixed with the shower water regularly to kill bacteria. the filter used could be very sophisticated if hundreds of showers without refilling were desired. the toilet would need to be a revolution in toilets. there has been a lot of work by the likes of the gates foundation to create toilets that are less resource intensive and clean for use in the third world. the best products of these efforts are desiccation toilets that essentially desiccate the feces though various means. one version drys the feces and burns it to dry more and also drive water purification. the toilet in the van would do something similar. the toilet would disinfect thoroughly with chlorine or ozone and then desiccate. the water left over would be put back into the top chamber of the toilet so to speak and used for the next flush. the desiccated feces could then be stored in much less volume than non desiccated feces and with less hassle. disposing of it would be pretty easy. other issues such as temperature and moister could be taken care of with heavy duty insulation, de-humidification and other things that are built into the van by design rather than added in as an after-thought if added at all. anyway, overall what you have is an extremely sophisticated, several hundred thousand dollar vehicle. thats what it would take to make van life a viable option for more than a year or two imo.

I found his reasoning very solid. To me it seemed like a nice way to save money, enjoy the time and invest it to into his game creating business. What made him a hippie to me was not the van part but the part where he created his own programming language before getting to work.